Email Lists - Email Marketing Run Amok? (It Can Be Bad For Your Business)
Even if you don't have any interest in Internet marketing and don't have a business (perhaps you don't even understand what that's), if you have e-mail, you have experienced the more ugly side of email marketing. You've probably even seen the advertisements for email address lists offering thousands-or even millions-of email addresses.
You will rest assured of one thing: if the price is not expensive, these aren't opt-in lists. Instead, these tremendous lists are loaded with “collected” email addresses. They may be equal to some listing of street addresses chosen from the phone book.
There is no phone book for email addresses, so where do these cheapo lists come from? Largely, the addresses are harvested from forums, pupil or membership lists, newsgroups, message boards, web logs, along with other locations where people gather to innocently swap information. They do not know their addresses are being gathered up and sold on the open market. And they surely did not request to have their inboxes polluted with junk.
Picking email addresses is just not illegal. But it's broadly considered unethical. You pay a fine or will not go to jail. Nevertheless, you can hurt your company, possibly irreparably. The potential outcomes for violating the unwritten rule about no email harvesting range from losing your ISP to having your business blacklisted to losing your domain name.